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Posted on Thursday 20 August 2009

C.I.A. Sought Blackwater’s Help in Plan to Kill Jihadists
New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI
August 19, 2009

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.

Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects.

The fact that the C.I.A. used an outside company for the program was a major reason that Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A.’s director, became alarmed and called an emergency meeting in June to tell Congress that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years, the officials said.

It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations…

For those of us who have always opposed the war or the torture program, it’s easy to pass over things like this as just more of the shenanigans of the Bush years. And maybe that’s a way to look at it. But another take on it is that this is part of the mammoth campaign to avoid oversight mounted during the whole Administration – "bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations." It started in the first moments with Cheney’s secret energy conference and continued until their last days in office.

It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program.

And I doubt the word "unclear" used in this sentence. "unconfirmed" might be better. What other reason would there to be to hire Blackwater than to go around oversight? Contractors went around the rules in interrogation, in guard duties, in every area where they’ve been used. Why else would we use them? By definition, they are more expensive. By history, they’re former US soldiers. By design, they’re driven by the profit motive and outside the military codes. If we’re saying we don’t have the expertise in our own Military/C.I.A., then the solution is to develop it, not to hire it.

The reason to keep our intelligence community and military operations under the government umbrella is obvious. The reason to use contractors is equally obvious – to avoid the kind of accountability that our form of government demands…

CIA Hired Firm for Assassin Program
Blackwater Missions Against Al-Qaeda Never Began, Ex-Officials Say
By Joby Warrick and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post
August 20, 2009

A secret CIA program to kill top al-Qaeda leaders with assassination teams was outsourced in 2004 to Blackwater USA, the private security contractor whose operations in Iraq prompted intense scrutiny, according to two former intelligence officials familiar with the events.

The North Carolina-based company was given operational responsibility for targeting terrorist commanders and was awarded millions of dollars for training and weaponry, but the program was canceled before any missions were conducted, the two officials said.

The assassination program — revealed to Congress in June by CIA Director Leon Panetta — was initially launched in 2001 as a CIA-led effort to kill or capture top al-Qaeda members using the agency’s paramilitary forces. But in 2004, after briefly terminating the program, agency officials decided to revive it under a different code name, using outside contractors, the officials said.

"Outsourcing gave the agency more protection in case something went wrong," said a retired intelligence officer intimately familiar with the assassination program…

The report in the Washington Post is more explicit than the one in the New York Times. The reason given – "Outsourcing gave the agency more protection" – is striking [il]logic. Like what’s important is accountability. So what was being "outsourced" was accountability. With thinking like that, no wonder our Middle Eastern Wars have been such disasters…

Ralph Roughton

August 22, 2009 | 11:10 AM

Pete Zimmerman on TheBackFence put it this way, which has a kind of starkness that makes you think:

“There are some state functions which ought not to be privatized; killing
in the name of the State is one.”
Mickey

August 23, 2009 | 10:29 AM

Brilliantly simple!

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